Episode #102: A Voice of Conscience
Ma Thida has lived through previous cycles of revolution and repression in Myanmar similar to the one we are all witnessing now. As her book Prisoner of Conscience details, her journey took her from university to the founding of the National League for Democracy (NLD), and from a dark Insein jail cell to discovering the promise of liberation within.
A self-professed bookworm who grew up listening to the BBC, she developed a keen interest in the stories of resistance fighters and philanthropists, and while attending medical school tried her own hand in writing fiction as well. Then in 1988, the military violently suppressed peaceful protesters at the nearby Rangoon Institute of Technology. “All the medical students were shocked to see how a government can kill students easily,” she recalls, noting that some soldiers even fired random shots at patients in Rangoon Hospital. So she joined a group of students and attended a subsequent demonstration, and also began to help make sure the news of what was really happening got out.
As the protests heated up, networks among the democracy activists grew tighter, and Ma Thida soon found herself volunteering at local NLD offices that had formed in the wake of the unrest. They had so few resources they couldn’t even furnish the office, and the work was unending and unpaid. At the same time, Ma Thida realized the historical significance of what was transpiring in the country, and began to take detailed journal entries, recording the daily events, speeches, meetings, and work. She also kept abreast of the dramatic changes happening internationally with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and she hoped that the Burmese people would also be able to rejoice in the same kind of freedom before too long.
But it was not to be. Fellow democracy activists were infuriated when the results of the 1990 elections weren’t honored by the military, and in 1993 Ma Thida began to lobby against the National Convention, an event hosted by the military ostensibly to draft a new Constitution, but was really just a façade to further delay any real democracy. Ma Thida was arrested for merely reading and then passing along a document prepared by the National Coalition Government, an exile group based in Maryland that was formed by a group of Burmese leaders. She was given 20 years for this “offense,” the severity of which Ma Thida believes belies the military’s real concern, that somehow she would be able to convince ethnic leaders to turn against the convention.
Adjustment to prison life was not easy. She found the prison culture and both jailers and prisoners “rough” and “hard.” However, she came to understand and even befriend them over time, and developed her closest relationship with a fellow prisoner, an activist who was accused of beheading a hired thug who had poisoned the water at a Children’s Hospital.
She first found relief from her situation in the form of smuggled books, which she could only read secretly under a blanket. “So the whole night I was just sitting in a squatting position and reading,” she recalls. “It gave me so much strength, because my hunger is not just for having food to survive, but also for intellectual understanding. Without that I don't think I can survive. That's why the books are really like a tonic to me.”
Unbeknownst to her at the time, her arrest had turned into something of a cause célèbre abroad, attracting support from the likes of REM’s lead vocalist, Michael Stripe, as well as President Bill Clinton’s foreign emissary, Bill Richardson, who even negotiated with Burmese authorities to visit her. Her case was also mentioned at the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women held in 1995 in Beijing. All this support meant a lot to her, because it “showed that our days in prison means not nothing. This is very strong proof of the injustice done by the military.”
But over time, even the steady diet of contraband books was not enough to sustain her, so she turned to meditation. Growing up in a Buddhist family, her introduction to the faith had initially been through the Pali texts, and her later love of literature in fact developed from intensively poring over the suttas. When Richardson met with her, she asked him to be allowed Buddhist-themed books, and from those, she devised a way she could practice meditation. Transforming her prison cell into a meditation cell, she informed inmates and guards alike she would be practicing intensively for up to twenty hours per day. A number of prisoners tried to talk her out of meditating for various reasons or doubted her motives, a contrast to the great admiration many readers have expressed after reading her account. Yet for Ma Thida, it was simply the only choice that made any sense at the time.
“Well, what I believe is freedom is by choice, not by chance. So almost all the time I was thinking, ‘Okay, as a prisoner, what can I do?” She notes. “I felt that I needed to free myself. In the prison, what can I do? I kept asking myself and I thought, 'Okay, freedom is guaranteed according to the Buddha's teaching. It is guaranteed only when you make an effort. Freedom from samsara is far harder than freedom from prison, because I can be released after 20 years imprisonment, but I cannot be released from samsara! In order to be free from samsara, what I need is just meditation, just looking at my body and mind, in prison, I don't need anything more.”
She took in teachings from the Mahasi and Mogok traditions, and was able to carry on a secret correspondence with Chan Myay Yeitha Sayadaw U Janaka, with notes smuggled back and forth when she had questions. She closely read the Maha Satipatthana Sutta, and chose to focus on Cittanupassana, or contemplation of mind. “Knowledge cannot make wisdom unless we practice it, so that's the basic thing. I think meditation practice can transform our knowledge into wisdom. So that's why the practice of Mahasi is doing more on how to put your mindfulness on both the body and the mind.”
She meditated especially on the experience of dukkha, or suffering, which prison certainly does not offer in small quantities. The effect was profound. “This experience made me a bit easier to be indifferent between the good and bad things, because I know all is impermanent. And because of this impermanence, or nature, whatever we face is suffering.”
Ma Thida also began to understand that many of those perpetuating the corrupt system were just cogs in the wheel of injustice, who themselves had limited freedom as well. “Most of the society itself… is also corrupted, if you don't have the right understanding, or the [Noble Eightfold Path.] If you don't have the right understanding about what is the root cause of what is happening, there are so many different ways that people accommodate or respond. It’s depending on how much knowledge and understanding we have. If we don't have a true understanding, real knowledge, real wisdom, then the way we react, the way we respond, the way we contribute to this corrupt system will make injustice and the wrong path. Meditation practice makes me understand the root cause.”
Yet there is no small irony here: a country that has contributed so much to teaching this spiritual path of inner wisdom, and even exporting it around the world, has also created terrible, corrupt systems that have lasted decades. For this, Ma Thida partly blames the monastic education system, which is more based on rote learning than critical thought. She notes many classes and discourses are in Pāḷi rather than Burmese, and so beyond the understanding of many. To her, all this is far cry from pativedha, or the kind of penetrating insights that transform one’s behavior. It also seems to her that traditional Burmese Buddhists are more interested in maintaining a good, comfortable life than achieving full liberation. “The real objectives of the Buddha's teaching is for facing Samsara, but people just apply as they wish, with limited knowledge, just for a particular moment.”
Ma Thida’s prison sentence was ultimately commuted, allowing her to be released in 1999, after serving five and a half years. She did not involve herself further in politics, instead devoting herself to literature and medicine. But she has closely followed the momentous events of the past ten years. And as someone who was by Aung San Suu Kyi’s side during her initial rise to prominence, she has also followed her career, as well.
However, she expresses a concern that Aung San Suu Kyi’s status as an icon may have led to her developing a kind of blind confidence in herself as a leader. “She thinks whatever she decides, whatever she initiates, or whatever she demands, [it will receive] supportive responses from the society within,” she notes. In addition, Ma Thida feels that Aung San Suu Kyi never truly understood the Tatmadaw, and held naïve optimism about her ability to inspire change from within. “She had so much hope and confidence about her ability to convince, but coup has proved that was failure,” Ma Thida notes sadly.
She offers another indictment of Aung San Suu Kyi as well, that the latter followed the traditional model in Burmese history of a single, strong leader rather than building consensus, since what the country needed was a “decentralized, collective leadership.” Mapping Burmese history back before even British colonial rule and into the days of the royal court and power of kings, she explains: “The real problem of our society is that… our whole country has never had a chance to discuss what kind of society we really want to have or build, and the collective identity has never been discussed well.”
Today, Ma Thida’s book is being read again, and widely. Many young Burmese activists, who never imagined finding themselves living through this same kind of destructive period, have turned to her book to better understand their own path forward. But as for Ma Thida, she is impressed by not only how much more this current generation seems to know than in 1988, but also in how much they are able to learn… and how fast they learn it. At the same time, she sees the Burmese military hasn’t evolved even a day.
“We are now able to understand what is justice, what are human rights, what is democracy, what is federalism etc. We weaponize ourselves with the necessary knowledge, necessary attitude, necessary behavior, but the Tatmadaw didn't do anything else! They are just wasting the State's budget, the State’s human resources, still trying to use religion and race as their weapons.”
For the current generation of democracy activists, Ma Thida has some advice. First and foremost is to “focus on principle, not on person… The winning secret will be focusing on the principle, and keeping an eye on the will of the majority of people, not just one person or yourself. That will help solve the problems easily. Empathy always matters, and use your own empathy to understand the society. Fulfilling the needs of the others will make sure you will have your needs.”